The following podcast contains explicit descriptions of violence, including sexual violence, that some listeners may find upsetting. Continue at your own risk.
Oh yeah, you didn't have to be a fan if you followed popular culture in the nineties, if you were into music at all, hell, if you were in your twenties or even anywhere near him. You remember Kurt Cobain's suicide. You don't necessarily remember the date, like nine to eleven.
Well I do.
It was April the nineteen ninety four. That's the day they found his body. Anyway, he'd been dead a couple days. Crazy right, one of the biggest stars on the planet, and his dead body was rotting in the room above his garage for days. It wasn't even family who found him. It was some electrician dude who came over to install some lighting.
That's Connor Langford remembering one of the seminal events of the nineteen nine the suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. You may remember from our previous episodes that Connor is the son of Domino Beach City councilman Greg Langford and one of the two men who found the body of the Domino Beach killer's first victim anyway.
Shocked under the head blame no more Nirvana. He quoted Neil Young in a suicide note. You know it's better to burn out than to fade away. I don't know, maybe he was right.
Here's Maya Morales, Connor's girlfriend at the time.
Oh yeah, when the news hit, I was working first shift at Gravel Records. Spring break was just kicking up, so there were a lot of college kids in town. By noon the next day, we had sold out of every Nirvana ced, every vinyl record, every cassette, every T shirt, poster, even those little metal buttons you pinned on your jacket, remember those. Yeah, all of a sudden, Nirvana was everyone's favorite band, a bunch of posers.
They were really fans.
Don't you think that they would have already had all that stuff.
I was twenty three years old in April of ninety four, and I have to admit I was one of the posers I was talking about. I was dating a guy who was in med school at USC at the time and was a huge grunge fan. So he was absolutely devastated. And I don't really know why, but I fell victim to the collective sadness of it all, Nirvana wasn't really my kind of band. I was still mostly into eighties music back then, and if you haven't figured it out
by now, I was desperately uncool in my twenties. But Nirvana had had such an impact on popular music and a huge influence on so many of my fellow gen xers. In the weeks after Cobain's death, I listened to them more than I ever had before or since. I mean to be honest, the only reason I bought their breakthrough CD never Mind in the first place was to hear the song Paully that the Murderer of Vera Kendrick had quoted a year and a half earlier. To say Cobain's
death was a big deal is an understatement. It may have affected us all in different ways. Some of us would miss his music, some of us related to the depression he felt. Some of us were simply saddened by the idea of a twenty seven year old musical genius at the top of his game checking out. And there are those who believe his suicide had an impact on the Domino Beach Killer because what he did next was
a major escalation. I'm Courtney Barnes and this is the Murder Years, Episode three, Cornflake Girl.
You got to understand. April is when Domino Beach started to wake up after the lean winter months.
That's Damon Stokes retired Sheriff of Delsoul County.
As soon as the spring breakers started rolling into town, the population tripled and everything opened up. Shops, restaurants, and bars that were only opened two or three days a week from September to March were open pretty much now twenty four to seven.
Almost every hotel.
And rental house was packed and booked solid until the end of August.
It's like everything really came to life all of a sudden. I was a local. It was truly something to.
See, it really was. Nineteen ninety four marked my second spring break spent in Domino Beach, and by then I had become a full fledged reporter on the payroll of the SoCal Journal. Glenn Sherman was still covering crime in politics and for the most part not letting me anywhere
near it. My beat was lifestyle and entertainment, which, to be honest, I was pretty happy about covering the murder of Via Kendrick right out of the gate and then, shadowing Glenn for a year had led me to the conclusion that I did not want to be a crime reporter, at least not yet. Even a small tourist town like
Domino Beach had crime. Besides the two unsolved murders of Via Kendrick and Billy Boy Reeves, there was the inland drug trade and everything that comes with that, prostitution, muggings, some shootings, you know, that sort of thing, and then you had domestic abuse cases, burglaries, bar fights. It was just too much for me. It's weird for me to think of myself like that, to remember there was a time before the world and all its cynicism burned away
any sense of innocence and naivete I once had. Anyway, I'd been promoted over the winter, so spring break was going to be my first chance to shine, to plant my flag and really own my beat. I'd spend time on the crowded beaches writing about all that the college kids were doing. I'd eat it all the restaurants in town and review the ones I liked. And remember, this was long before the birth of Yo, when everyone and their brothers suddenly became a food critic. Although unlike most yelpers.
I promised to never pan a place fight didn't like it. I'd follow the if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all rule. I still had to live with these people, and of course I'd cover the spring break nightlife, listening to live music and dive bars and watching half naked college kids rive on outdoor dance floors
overlooking the ocean. It's going to be fun. It was supposed to be fun, and I have no doubt that's exactly what Holly Blake, Mary Crouch, and Sandra Gerard thought when they drove all the way from Arizona State University to Domino Beach.
The way I understand it, Holly Blake had an unclehole in the house where they stayed. He never lived there himself, though you know it only met him once or twice. It was purely a rental property for him, you know, a money maker and a good one.
Can you describe it?
Well, sure, it's a long time since you know. It's torn down now, as you know, but I remember it pretty clearly. It was one level, three bedrooms, I mean maybe four, but I think three, and it was a modern kitchen, A couple of decent sized bathrooms, massive back deck.
On stilts that overlooked the ocean. It's real beauty.
Booked all summer long, but it was, you know, usually empty during the spring break. It was one of the most expensive rentals in town, too much for most college kids.
So you know it was going to stay empty most of April.
I guess miss Blake's uncle decided he might as well let her and her friends just use it.
Oh.
It was in a very active part of Domino Beach too, within walking distance of downtown and not too far from Senior Gusto, the beach front bar of choice for the spring Breakers. Cheap shots, live music, some nights of DJ others, wet t shirt contest, karaoke, and know all that nonsense.
Holly, Mary and Sandra must have felt like they'd hit the jackpot. They were three fun, pretty college girls staying in one of the hottest houses on the coolest part of the beach, and yeah, it proved too good to be true.
The way it went down was like this. Nine to one.
One got a call a little after three in the morning on April twenty first. It was oh god, Thursday, Yeah, right, it's Thursday.
The house next door was home to the Gillen family.
Adam Gillen was a lawyer who worked in San Diego's wife, Darla, was a TV writer in Hollywood. I don't remember what shows she worked on. I didn't watch a lot of TV back then. Well, they were year round residents. Darla worked from home most times and Adam commuted back and forth from San Diego. Well, they didn't think too much
of these spring breakers. I mean, like I said before, the house these girls were staying and was usually vacant during spring break, but that week the house was party central. Didn't take too long for those girls to become the most popular tourists in town. During the daytime, there were upwards of twenty kids going in and out from the beach, beating the heat or refilling their drinks and so on. And at night the girls invited half the town over to keep the park going after the bar has closed.
I mean, you know they were doing it up.
So anyway, it was after three am Thursday morning, April twenty first, nine to one one gets a call from Adam Gillen.
Apparently there'd been some loud music.
Coming from the house next door all night and he couldn't take it anymore. He had to go to work the next morning, so he walked over there in a huff. He's in his bathrobe and slippers, and he wants to ask him to turn it down. When he got there, he found the front door standing wide open, says He called out, but the music was so loud you could barely hear himself, so he took a few steps inside.
What Adam Gillen saw inside the house made him turn right around, run outside, throw up in the bushes, and then hurry back to his house to call nine one one.
What I saw when I arrived, I mean, it was just horrific. The deputy on duty beat me there, but only about by ten minutes. The nine one one dispatcher called me at home, told me that if what Adam Gillen was saying turned out to be true, I better go see it for myself.
And what did you see when you got there?
The first thing I saw was blood, lots of it, silking in the pale gray carpet of this living room. And lying in the middle of that blood is twenty year old Sandra Gerard.
She was wearing shorts and a tank.
Top, but you know, a nice one summertime going out closed.
The top was torn up pretty good.
She had the stab wounds all over her body, at least a couple of dozen. She was lying face down, the wrist tied behind her back, the plastic zip tie. There was another puddle of blood on the carpet right next to her, quite so big, and the start of a long red smear that went all the way across the living room carpet into the kitchen tile. And that's where twenty one year old Holly Blake was found. And she was wearing one of those summer dresses like her
friend Sandra. She was just covered in stab wounds, had her hands bound. It look like sh she'd been dragged and reguled her way into the kitchen and probably trying to get to the phone call for help.
But you know she I don't know, she didn't make it.
And what about Mary Crouch?
We found Mary, also twenty one years old, uh in the master bedroom.
She was found naked.
She'd been raped, beaten, uh, and she had been strangled to death.
Just like Vera Hendrick.
That's right.
Adam Gillen, the next door neighbor who found the bodies, had come over to complain about the loud music coming from the house. As if the volume hadn't been annoying enough, it was the same song playing over and over for at least an hour that really got to him, Cornflake Girl by Tory Amos. The source of the music was a ninety minute cassette tape with that one song recorded onto it, repeating itself over and over on the living
room stereo. Apparently the killer had played it during his assault on the women and let it play while he raped and strangled Mary Crouch, then repeatedly stabbed Sandra Gerard and Holly Blake. Then he cranked up the volume and left it playing on his way out the door, likely because he wanted the bodies to be found sooner rather than later. He was proud of what he'd done and wanted others to see his work. But why that song? Why Cornflake Girl?
Cornflake Girl was kind of like a feminist anthem of the nineties. I was more of a hip hop R and B girl myself back then, so Tori Amos wasn't my jam. But it was a pretty good song, I admit it. Supposedly it was about how some women will screw over other women, even if they're good friends and that's what a cornflake girl is.
In retrospect, it's not surprising that the Domino Beach killer would subvert a feminist song like that, letting it play while he raped and murdered these young women. He probably got some weird kind of pleasure out of it. If you listen to the lyrics. There are some ominous sounding phrases in there, like she's gone to the other side, and a nervous sounding stuttering of this is not really happening, followed by Amos almost screeching you bet your life it is.
It's weirdly haunted. But that's not why the killer chose that song, at least it wasn't the only reason.
So the story, and I heard this before the murders, but back when I was working at Gravel Records, is that Torri Amos had read some book.
And was possessing the Secret of Joy. Huh, Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker. That was the book.
Are you telling this or am I?
You are?
Maya?
So she read this book which apparently talked about the practice of female genital mutilation in some parts of Africa, and I guess it was pretty common for a girl's friend or aunt or cousin or whatever to betray the girl and either do the deed themselves or bring them to someone who did sick, twisted shit right.
Mary Crouch, the victim who was found raped and strangled to death in the bedroom, had her literal glands and labia minora sliced off with the same knife used to stab her friends to death.
What we determined was after the party cleared out, the killer came in. Girls may have left the door unlocked, or maybe they he had been at the party. We weren't sure, but there was no sign of forced entry. He attacked the women, all three of them who had been drinking heavily that night, and tied them up, then put on the music and took Mary into the bedroom,
where he raped and strangled her. Then he went into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, murdered Holly and Sandra, and went back into the bedroom and did what he did to Marry.
At least you know, she was already dead.
The knife was found on the floor next to the bed. The removed genitalia were never recovered.
These were not only the most violent murders ever committed by the Domino Beach Killer, they were the most violent murders I have ever seen in my career and still are to this day.
Maybe everyone, myself included, had fallen under the spell of Councilman Langford's there's nothing to see here rhetoric. But prior to the murders of Holly, Sandra and Mary, the thought of a serial killer in Domino Beach had never even entered my mind. Not in September nineteen ninety two, when Vera Kendrick was murdered, Not in July of ninety three, when the body of teenage junkie and prostitute Billy Boy Reeves was found with his throat slit ear to ear
in the dumpster behind Triple Bes. Those two murders still felt completely disconnected. No one even considered they were related. Up until then, there had been no real sense of fear and certainly no panic in Domino Beach. But all that changed in April nineteen ninety four. I remember being in the journal offices the day Holly, Sandra and Mary's bodies were found, watching a pale, uncharacteristically quiet Glenn Sherman
bang out the story on his old clunky mat. He wasn't nervous just because he suspected whatever he wrote would be picked up by other papers all across the country, which it was. No he had other concerns. It's hard to write about things like women being butchered in such horrible ways and still sound like you're being respectful to the victims and their families. And Glenn he was never the tight to hold back. He was looking to walk right up to the line where detailed accuracy becomes unnecessary
exploitation without crossing it. And to his credit, I think he was successful. That was a rough year for our little town of Domino Beach.
Well, my fucking dad couldn't exactly sweep that one under the rug, could he? Vera even though she was a of mine, didn't rate. Can you imagine that your own son is trying to get you to help solve the murder of someone he cared about and your response is essentially fuck it. She was just a homeless hippie, right, and she never contributed any money to the community.
Who cares?
But those girls, they went to college, They had families, families with money. Their murders got talked about on the national fucking news. There was no hiding this one, huh. And my father always true to fucking form. He saw it as a goddamn opportunity. He had his political sights set on a bigger office, and he saw this as a way to get his name out there, get people all over the country to know who he was off the backs of three mutilated college students piece of shit.
Writing It's true.
Counsel in Laneford leaned on me hard, especially when there were cameras around, said if I didn't solve those murders by the end of tourist season, I might as well just pack up and leave, because he'd make sure his hell I didn't win my next election, and he had the pull to make that happen too. So I started working on the only lead I had, Stan Majors.
If you remember from last episode, Stan Majors was an ex con, registered sex defender and person of interest in the nineteen ninety two murder of Vera Kendrick.
I admit that I never believed Majors was involved in the murder of the Asu girls, but we.
Didn't have anywhere else to go. There were no usable fingerprints on the murder weapon or anywhere else on the scene, No semen or hair was found, no skin or blood under any of the girl's fingernails. No one saw a goddamn thing, you know. So the girls had thrown a party that night. There were at least two or three dozen kids at the house, most of them from out of town.
We talked to every single one of them got nowhere.
No one would admit to being the last one to leave, and no one said there was anyone who looked.
Suspicious or shady.
There either, just a bunch of kids getting drunk, getting high, dancing, hooking up. So I didn't see the harm in bringing Stan Majors back to the station for a word or two.
But you know I was wrong.
There was plenty of out of town press in Domino Beach. In the days after the murders of the ASU students and councilman Langford leaked to reporters from TV stations in Los Angeles and San Diego that Stokes was bringing in a suspect for questioning. This wasn't exactly true, since Stan Majors was never officially declared a suspect in any of the Domino Beach murders. But when Stokes arrived at the station with Majors in the backseat of his car.
It was a shit show, is what it was. Goddamn media circus.
It took me about an hour to make the round trip all the way to and from the gas.
Station where Majors was working, and when I pulled up.
To the sh station, if you have thought it was the red carpet of the oscars.
Here's some archive footage from Sheriff Stokes interview with Stan Major's that day.
No, I haven't been to Domino Beach in uh not since maybe last October.
Why are you lying to me?
Stan? I'm not lying?
Yeah you are now.
Maybe you killed those girls and maybe you didn't. I didn't. I didn't kill either way.
Stan, you're lying to me right now, and I don't care for it. You were at that party that night, weren't you?
What?
No, you think they'd led me into that house. They were from out of town. Stand they didn't know you. They didn't know what you've done. What you're capable of.
I'm not capable of that. I couldn't hurt anyone.
Like you've done it before. You beat a minor half unconscious because she turned you down. That what happened here? You tried to get with Mary and what after you made you mad.
No, I don't know who that is. I never seen those girls.
Yeah, never met them before that night.
Never look, men, what I did. It was almost ten years ago. Now I pay my debt to society. I'm still paying it. I hardly ever go anywhere besides working my trailer. I just want to get back there now. Please let me go back there.
I I mean, I regret going at him so hard, considering he had no evidence on him whatsoever.
But you know, like I said, I was under a lot.
Of pressure from counseling Langford.
Right, yeah, he saw that fucking guy.
It's the perfect target.
I don't know if my dad ever thought he actually killed those students or not. I don't think the idea of justice ever entered into his thinking. No, what he cared about was making it go away. What was going through his mind was how can I put an end to this shit storm as fast as possible? And his answer was depended on the local registered sex offender. And it wasn't a bad idea either. I mean, who fuck cares about a guy like that? Who's going to go to bat for a goddamn rapist?
Okay, look, I have to state for the record that like Connor Langford is saying Stan Majors was a tough guy to feel sorry for.
He was found.
Guilty for and later admitted to trying to rape a seventeen year old girl in Los Angeles in the nineteen eighties. So first and foremost, fuck that guy.
But oh, that poor son of a bitch went through hell.
I mean, there was footage of him walking into the sheriff's station with me on every channel on every TV in the country. Over the next couple of months, they did investigations and expose a's on them on a couple of those primetime news shows, you know, making it seem like suspect number one. Even though I never charged him with the damn thing, he couldn't set foot outside his trailer without being called a rapist and a murder and a hell of a lot worse than that.
In June of that year, a couple of frat.
Boys from Asu came to town, found on the gas station where he worked, and beat the living shit out of him. I mean, they put him in the hospital and I put them in a lockup, but their daddy's made some calls to Greg Langford and they got out without so much as a slap on the wrist. I'm telling you, whatever Stan Majors has done, and he's done a lot, he paid for a dozen times over until.
Well.
On September twelfth, nineteen ninety four, just six days shy of the two year anniversary of the death of Vera Hendrick, Stan Majors locked himself in his trailer, took a shotgun to his head, and committed so side just like Kurt Cobain had back in April.
Within a couple of weeks, the District Attorney's office posthumously charged him with the murders of Holly Blake, Sandra Gerard, and Mary Crouch. And then they tacked on Vera Kendrick because.
You know, why the hell not so you didn't believe Stan Majors was the killer.
Even back then, I believed he could have possibly killed Vera Kendrick since that was, you know, an impulse crime. But when it came to those girls, Stan wasn't the sharpest tack in the box. You know, he had an IQ in the low eighties. I don't think he was capable of the planning it would have taken to pull off those murders without getting caught. But you know, I wanted him to be the killer, and not for the
same reasons Langford wanted it. All he cared about was keeping the image of Domino Beaches, this fun, easygoing beach town where people could come and spend their money without fear of being raped or murdered. I mean, to him, it was all about perception. I wanted justice, and maybe because I wanted it so bad, for a while there, I deluded myself into believing justice.
Had been served.
We all wanted to believe that Domino Beach had experienced five murders and a suicide in less than two years. My friends back in Los Angeles were concerned for me, trying to get me to move back home. Can you imagine that? Who the hell moves to LA to feel safer? And I can't say I didn't consider it. I mean, what the hell was I still doing in Domino Beach anyway? I had enough experience at that point. I could have easily gotten a job in a major city. I mean,
maybe not LA, but somewhere. And I was only making like twenty five grand a year, and rent wasn't exactly cheap in Domino Beach. I was barely making ends meet. Why was I still there. I didn't have a good answer back then, and I don't. All I could say was that somehow, somehow I knew Domino Beach was where I was supposed to be, and despite what the police and the politicians were saying in late nineteen ninety four, after the death of Stan Majors, somehow I knew it wasn't over.
No, no one believed it was him. When that rapist piece of shit killed himself, all anyone thought was, oh good, there's one less rapist piece of shit in the world.
But no one believed.
It was the rapist piece of shit who killed those spring Breakers.
So you thought it was a serial killer. Even back then, I don't.
Know if I thought it was a serial killer. I just knew it was a cycle and I guess I hoped whoever it was left town by the end of the tourist season that year.
But we know now that he didn't.
Yeah, we found that out pretty quick.
There would be other murders and die Beach before it was over, but nothing would measure up to the violence and depravity of the murders of Mary Crouch, Sandra Gerard, and Holly Blake. Up to that point, the killer had been very careful. He had not left behind any evidence that could be traced back to him, and no one had so much as gotten a glimpse of him, his car, or anything. He was a ghost, but he was about to make his first mistake. The Murder Years is a
production of AYR Media and iHeartMedia. Executive producer Elisa Rosen for AYR Media. Written by Tim Huddleston, directed by Alisa Rosen, Editing and sound designed by Tristan Bankston, Consulting producer Jean Chandil coordinator All Goldberg, Audio engineering and mastering by Justin Longerbeam studio engineer Josh Hook. Original music by Nathan Bankston. Original concept developed in partnership with Anne Margaret Johns and
Greg Spring, Executive producer for iHeartMedia. Maya Howard performances for this episode by Erica Leniac as Courtney Barnes, Tom Virtue as Sheriff Damon Stokes, Alex Salem as Connor Langford, Melon Faxis as Maya Morales, Michael Cussman as Stan Majors, Matt Fogerty as young Detective Stokes.